Sondheim's musical Sweeney Todd might not match the Leeds location, but strong
vocal performances and a gripping tale promises a healthy production for
West Yorkshire Playhouse.

Big challenges await James Brining, the new artistic director of West Yorkshire Playhouse. The theatre’s large main house, the Quarry, is easy to empty, hard to fill - and in recent years, despite refurbishments, the venue has struggled to connect with the city. Brining, who grew up here, reckons he can make improvements in architectural terms. In artistic terms, quality work always helps and even if his first production as the man in charge, a revival of Sondheim’s 1979 masterpiece Sweeney Todd, doesn’t exactly yell “Leeds”, its undoubted excellence makes a very healthy start.

That said, I’m not convinced by his overarching conceit - which relocates the action to the late Seventies/early Eighties on the basis that the disparity between rich and poor in the Thatcher years reached Dickensian levels of desperation. The homelessness fits but did Mrs T countenance transportation? Hmm. As with Jonathan Kent’s recent staging, which supplied a Thirties makeover, you wonder what’s wrong with giving this lurid melodrama its full Victorian flavour. Somewhat distracting too is the decision to present the story as if spirited up by the inmates of a psychiatric institution, a motley crew of characters shuffling about a comfortless interior in a zombified, possibly drugged-up state in a sort of cross between One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and Peter Weiss’ Marat/Sade. There’s certainly madness and incarceration in the musical; this stroke heavily underlines that.

Yet the tale is so gripping, Sondheim’s score so fertile in wit and invention, the singing so thrilling, the performances so winning and the overall staging, which utilises industrial containers to create tightly enclosed locations, lends itself so well to the shadowy horrors of the piece that these reservations hardly matter.

David Birrell gives us a wonderfully aloof, introverted, seething “Demon Barber of Fleet Street”, cradling his razors, vicious-eyed beneath cold strip-lighting and efficiently dispatching his victims - blood a-spurting - with no more concern than a garbage-collector depositing trash down a chute. His pursuit of singular vengeance against the venal rich and powerful is matched by the painfully lonely devotion of Gillian Bevan’s unloveable Mrs Lovett, who here runs an East End caff complete with modern pie counter and electric fly-zapper. Niamh Perry impresses as Todd’s devout, preyed-upon daughter Johanna, Don Gallagher as her wicked guardian Judge Turpin and when the 16-strong ensemble join voices, it’s enough to make the hairs on the back of your neck stand on end.